The Progressive blogosphere has a long-running joke "theory" regarding a holy grail of sorts - the one story or the one piece of evidence that would tie together all the scandals rolling out of the Bush Administration on a near-hourly basis. A sort of Unified Field Theory, only of corruption, political style.

This week, the U.S. Attorney Purge Scandal has mushroomed like a toxic Turdblossom cloud over the Executive Branch, tying together the electoral and campaign machinations of the Bush White House with the increasingly obvious, and now documented, politicization of the Department of Justice. Not only were U.S. Attorneys fired for not pursuing bogus "voter fraud" cases while other U.S. Attorneys retained for misusing their substantial power in politically motivated prosecutions, but considerable taxpayer resources have been devoted (and misused) towards trumping up claims of "epidemic" voter fraud where none exists: even the supposedly non-partisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) is in on it, covering up their own reports whenever the results don't jibe with the Bush Admin Master Plan.

Democratic advocacy organization People For The American Way (PFAW) is still inexplicably mis-stating (or purposely obfuscating) the true nature of the difference between paper trails vs. paper ballots in the Holt bill, HR 811 and has now been found to be deceptively using Brad's name, and that of The BRAD BLOG to do it. We will, of course, remain vigilant in keeping the pressure on PFAW and their friends to do the right thing, and several articles this week call on you to write pfaw@pfaw.org to demand exactly that.

The unsinkable Secretary of State for California, Debra Bowen, presented a knock-out editorial last week spelling out the steps ahead for truly verifiable elections. And sitting right next to the Secretary of State's op/ed was BRAD BLOG's own guest blogger Emily Levy's op/ed, literally and figuratively on the same page!

As Arlen Parsa exposed last week, the Iraq surge is (unsurprisingly) unraveling like the U.S. Attorney Purge cover-up, and the next few weeks of House Oversight and Reform Committee hearings (will Condi Rice show? will Gonzales?) should be nothing if not, er, interesting.

And as Michael Richardson detailed, voter registration issues in Florida are once again drawing questions, even as AP reported thousands of destroyed voter registration forms found in Atlanta.

Catch up on the key headlines you may have missed last week at The BRAD BLOG, so you'll be upped for this coming week's istallment of Incompetence and Corruption on Parade. If lastweek's developments were any indication, hold onto your hats, folks, it's becoming an increasingly bumpier and bumpier ride...

CA SoS Bowen Strikes Back: Speaks up (Again) for the VOTERS!Responds to Editorial by Former CA SoS's Newspaper, Criticism from CA Elections Officials Who Admit Their Voting Systems are Likely Neither Secure nor Accurate
ALSO: Op/Ed by BRAD BLOG/VelvetRevolution.us's Own Emily Levy Runs Along Side Bowen's in Same Paper...

[A] surprise Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision ... issued an order immediately overturning a case brought by Biskupic against Georgia Thompson, an aide to Wisconsin's Democratic governor, Jim Doyle. Just in time for the '06 election we might add. (It didn't help; Doyle won anyway.)

The basis for the unusual appellate court decision was that the evidence used to convict Thompson on charges related to voting irregularities was virtually non-existent --- leading the senators to question what sort of pressure was brought on Biskupic to bring the charges in the first place.

"We are seeing instances of voters being changed to a different party when there was no user activity. This is our top priority now." - From recently obtained email concerning Florida's Voter Registration Database development in 2006.

[T]he New York Times reported, “Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews. Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.” Why is it that the main-stream media can report this yet the supposedly bi-partisan Election Assistance Commission refuses to release a report that says the same thing?

Also late yesterday San Diego Co, CA announced that they had hired Michael Vu to be their assistant registrar of voters. Vu resigned under fire from his last job as the election director of Cuyahoga Co, OH where two of his employees were convicted of election fraud for pre-counting precincts in a scheme to cherry-pick precincts to be recounted with no problems.

After hearing Fitz I am convinced that he was compromised. I do think, however, that he believes in what he did. Not indicting Rove. I mean, it appears that he choose not to ask the grand jury to indict Rove.

(Brad Blog Chronicles, emphasis added). We suspected years ago that pressure was being put on him.
I notice that some blogs are not afraid to deal with the US Attorney scandal, and specifically that some were not fired after they brought unjust prosecutions against democrats.

The "lost" emails, which were purposefully destroyed to obstruct justice, are just one glaring, loud, in your face example of the ongoing criminality in the what house.

And that it has been ongoing from day one. They set out to break all criminal records and have already succeeded.

The Holy Grail is out there; it's just waiting for Waxman or Conyers to wade into it. Maybe they are testing the waters, exploring the best way into it. Maybe they are afraid for their lives; planes crash and cars crash. But the core of the corruption is the the case of whistleblower Sibel Edmunds, former FBI agent. Her case is about the intersection of illegal arms trafficking, heroin trafficing, money laundering, terrorist activities and the corruption of many "highly-recognizable, highly-known names" in and around the US government, i.e., the neocons.